Railways Blog

Patrick Crozier has a post on Transport Blog explaining why buses are never going to an acceptable substitute for train travel.

Today’s essential reading from The Guardian. It reveals the full horror story behind the West Coast Modernisation, starring everyone from the Adam Smith Institute to Halliburton. Nobody comes out of this story with any credit, least of all the Tory government that privatised the railways, and the Labour government that failed to tackle the problem.

As for how this affects me personally, the five month blockade from Cheadle Hulme to Crewe doubles the length of my daily commute, adding an hour to my day. Over five months it’s 100 hours of my life I won’t get back.

(Link from Transport Blog)

Electric Nose reminds us that the Model Railroader’s Layout Planning issue is out, and tells us why he thinks Model Railway magazines in the US are so much better than those over here in Britain.

Despite zero interest in American outline modelling, I always find MR’s annual “Model Railroad Planning” issue inspirational reading; many of the ideas are just as applicable to models set in Britain or continental Europe, and the standard of presentation and writing does make British magazines look amateurish by comparison.

Another weekend, another train show!

This weekend it was the London Festival of Model Railways at Alexandra Palace.

It’s organised by the publishers of “British Railway Modelling” and “Traction” in association with the Model Railway Club, who formerly organised the Easter shows at Westminster Central Hall I used to attend back in the 70s and 80s. Like Doncaster there are rather too many traders, but thanks to the MRC’s involvement the layouts were of the highest quality.

Unlike some 4mm-centric shows, there was plenty of N gauge, and a fair amount of non-British prototypes

British N was represented by the superlative “Acton Main Line”, which has been on the exhibition circuit for several years now; a very accurate and highly detailed model of the first station on the four-track main line out of Paddington with it’s associated stone terminal and sorting sidings; set in 1989 it’s definitely a historical model now with a large number of locomotive hauled passenger trains and first generation DMUs. There was also “Sea Wall”, a 1960s transition area model of the famous sea wall section of the West of England main line between Dawlish and Teighnmouth, with no less than four tunnels through the distinctive red cliffs. The layout had no station, no pointwork, and only a single building on the cliff top. Just like the prototype. The whole area is instantly recognisable to anyone familiar with the area, even though the Castles and Britannias were rather before my time.

Representing prototypes from across the channel we had Zertrummelt, set in Germany in 1945 under allied occupation. It represents a bombed out town where the RAF had done their worst, but the military engineers have managed to get the trains running again through the shattered station, using whatever German trains had survived supplemented by rolling stock bought in by the allies. It gives the builder the opportunity to run German, British and American rolling stock side-by-side on the same layout. Then there was the French Givry-Vignoux, set on the diesel-operated Paris-Basel line. I’d seen this a couple of years ago at the Maidenhead show in it’s earlier form as an end-to-end with fiddle yards at each end; now it’s reconfigured as a continuous run with a fiddle yard behind the scenic boards. Finally there was the tiny Swiss layout Understadt, built on a plywood door just 6’6″ by 2’6″.

The exhibition is also a place for manufacturers to showcase new products. Bachmann had pre-production samples of the “Western” in maroon, and in “Chromatic Blue”. I’m not sure how popular a short-lived one-off livery is going to be, but I’m more tempted by that than the horrid maroon 50 they did a couple of years back, which is still cluttering up dealers’ shelves. There was also a First Great Western “Flying Fag Packet” MkII. I’d wondered whether it’s actually possible to reproduce this complex livery in a small scale, and the model was something of a compromise, but Colin Albright of Bachmann told me this was a first attempt, and they hope to do better.

I also had a long chat with Ben Ando of ATM, who are making a new range of high-quality ready-to-run models of modern freight wagons. First model, already on sale, is a five-unit articulated car carrier; under development are two types of container wagon. I’ve very interested in their next project, which will be a “Silver Bullet” china clay slurry tanker. I’d like a block rake of these to model the famous Burngullow to Irvine train behind a pair of 37s; I wonder how many I’ll be able to afford!

One good thing about the British show circuit is the way you meet up with old friends on a regular basis, such as members of my old club from before I moved to Manchester. Gives me the chance to chat (or simply annoy) people like Alan Monk, Steve Grantham, Stu, and Roechard Wibb. I won’t say who it was that speculated as to why Electric Nose has been totally silent over the new Bachmann 20 which is shaped rather like a class 20!

There is something worse than the dreaded Virgin Voyagers. It’s called the Virgin Pendolino

The railway press has been gushing praise about this train; I don’t know if Virgin have been plying them with so many free drinks that they’ve been ignoring the train’s obvious flaws, or whether they’re taking the Railway Modeller line; it looks OK at normal view distances (i.e. not from inside), and will improve with running-in.

On Friday night I travelled on one of these horrors for the first time. All I can say is that Pendowobbles are to Voyagers what the Voyagers are to the good old Mk3s. Clearly nobody from Modern Railways or Rail has travelled in the Standard class portion of one of these things on a busy Friday night.

The interior resembles the inside of a plane, and not in a good way. The combination of high seat backs and the ridiculously small windows makes them very claustrophobic indeed. A significant percentage of the seats have no external view at all; imagine facing a blank window pillar all the way from London to Glasgow. And if you are lucky enough to get a seat by a window, you find the lower sill of the window digs into your arm. And finally, just like the Voyagers, there’s a serious lack of luggage space.

Electric Nose tells us what he really thinks of magazine reviews, naming Model Rail as the worst offender. As we should expect by now, absolutely no punches are pulled.

But it looks perfectly acceptable at normal viewing distances, and will probably improve with running in.

Steve Karlson of Cold Spring Shops has taken delivery of a new locomotive, and is speculating on liveries. I think they look good in the original Swedish orange, personally. Scandinavia’s revenge for the GM Nohabs.

Perhaps we Brits should take revenge for those class 66s, and sell Amtrak a vast fleet of Virgin Voyagers. Or would that just be cruel?

Webcam technology has reached the stage where there’s a camera small enough to fit on a N gauge train. Here are some of the results, including some taken at the Farnham club’s superb “Basingstoke” layout.

When I was a child, the cities of the future were filled with monorails. But the idea never caught on outside of theme parks and the like, and things like this.

Meanwhile, who would have though that we’d see the revival of what was then thought a completely obsolete technology, the tram? But these are not your grandfather’s trams; the new trams in Nottingham look as sleek and futuristic as any of the monorails we dreamed of in the sixties. So maybe the future did happen, only not quite as we expected?

(Links from Live from the Third Rail and Transport Blog)

Local businesses may run rural railway lines

More than 1,300 miles of rural rail lines could be handed over to local businesses or voluntary groups in an effort to reduce their current Treasury subsidy of £200 million a year.

The Government’s Strategic Rail Authority published plans yesterday for “community development” of 60 loss-making branch lines across England and Wales, but refused to exclude the possibility that some might close.

More on this on the SRA’s own site here.

I think this is an idea whose time has come. On my visits to Switzerland I’ve travelled on many of the ‘private’ railways that aren’t a part of the Swiss Federal Railways network. Many of these are short local lines in rural areas, but some are quite extensive networks including some busy commuter lines. One (the BLS) even includes a section of a major international through route. Like all Swiss railways, they’re efficiently and smartly run.

The advantage of these little local lines is that they’re under local management, and local people feel enought of a sense of ownership they wouldn’t have if their line was an remote part of a large network . They also control their own resources (staff and rolling stock) So they don’t have gaping holes in the timetable at what should have been a busy time of day because someone at the other end of the country decides the unit and crew need to be used on a commuter run on another line. (Link from Transport Blog)